The Divorce
by fauvist
Summary: YAMAMOTOXREADER ONE-SHOT. For VIVIANVAMPYRIC. You married him thinking he was the perfect man, but nothing good lasts.


**THE DIVORCE**

You liked to think you wedded Yamamoto Takeshi at a discount supermarket. You hadn't met him there, let alone married him there, but you always looked back at that day. He'd pushed the shopping cart, his arm kept casually around your waist because the floor was wet, and he was worried. He was exciting and new. His smile and his crinkling eyes pulled you close so easily. He had become a fascination.

Back when you wore make-up every day, he was softly handsome, but as his thirties had seized him, he became so muscular and so thin—motions as raw as canyons—that at night when he undressed in the shadows, your eyes watched him and wondered who he was. He was too tired to shave on weekends, and his beard scratched your plush cheeks when he kissed you. You might have said something three years ago, but these things change too.

There was more than a beard that made you wince. He became more distant, his smile more enigmatic, and you began to think him a stranger. He made love looking at the headboard as if something was flowing out of his eyes he did not want you to see. He always used a condom, and you did not protest this either.

He had become a muscle from head to toe, and his heart a quiet, caged knot. He came in at night smelling of alcohol and smoke, and you began to draw all your trust back to your side of the bed.

Tonight, you cradled your head, hunched over the dining room table. You let yourself fall into the maple pattern of the wood. Across this vast, honey counter, center-pieced with a vacant fruit bowl dirty with onion peels, the microwave blinked 11:09. Your hands switched through a stack of bills. Their edges were jagged where the envelopes had been broken open. You had been flipping through this collection of mail, removed from the shoebox, all paid with that man's credit card. You thought of how the apartment had come to feel like this shoebox pushed near the fruit bowl. The house was filled with your two smells, your scatter laundry, and your comforts.

But the kitchen was a lonely world this evening, and his smell had begun to fade. You had to get up at five to commute to work. You ought to go to bed and escape the stickiness of this honey table. Where was he tonight? The kitchen's bareness extended further than the granite countertops.

Your marriage was through. Forget that kiss and that promise, your smiles and clasped hands meant for the children and the grandchildren to admire in photographs. He wasn't angry when you dropped the first plate—left-overs from his dad's restaurant. But after the second and the third, he finally listened to you instead of trying to shush you. Sometimes, you got this queer chill that he knew the first plate was on purpose.

You told him you hated his cheap laugh because it came out for any woman.

But you knew even before you married him that it was the only laugh he would ever use. You knew he thought laughing made him transparent, but you also knew he was hardly. You looked out the window of the loft. You lived on the highest floor of the apartment complex. He liked it for the view and you had liked it because he liked it.

Another plate broke.

"Why do you even bother coming home at night?"

"You can't understand."

"Understand what? That my husband is a ghost? I haven't seen you in a week!"

"I got caught up with travel. I've told you I get busy with work." He picked up a towel and evasively began to dry the dishes.

"Not even a phone call?"

"No service in Somalia."

"Somalia. What business do you have in Somalia?"

"Business that I regret, it seems." He set down the towel, his calm eyes flicking to yours.

"Just—don't Yamamoto-kun. Maybe I just need to be on my own the way you _need_ to be all on your own. Then, everyone can just be happy. It can be like happily-ever-after." You swept your palm in front of you dramatically as you concluded slowly and emphatically.

"Hey, c'mon. Why are you so uncooperative? I do want to make it up to you."

"You want to make it up to me? Then stop! Stop disappearing!"

"You know I can't promise that." He pressed his arms onto the sink, looking into it so fiercely. You wanted him to rush to you. "It's just a part of my job."

"Worthless husband," you said, your voice raising, running your hands through your hair. "What job makes you do such things?" A silence pervaded between the two of you.

"I can't do this anymore. I'm going to bed," you hurried away, refusing to approach him. He had turned his back on you in that silence. "Don't follow me," you added from the doorway. The door slammed shut behind you, and he had the kitchen to himself.

So you divorced him, a quick and quiet affair, as stern as a funeral. Your lawyers made a wall between you and the strange husk of a man. You didn't look at him, and he might have looked to you, checked for any last traces of the old you, but he most likely looked away having given up too.


End file.
